Tuesday, 19 September 2017

Family Meal Planning: Some Ideas to Ease the Burden

Family meal planning is one of those tasks that sounds so dry and dull, but it doesn’t have to be. For a start, it can really help you to improve your family’s diet and provide everyone with interesting meals. On top of that, it can provide you with room to do new things and have fun while you cook. That has to be a good thing, so here are some ideas to transform that burden into a pleasure.

Discuss Ideas with the Family

First of all, you need to make sure that you’re making meals that your family enjoys. This is not always easy because, as anyone with experience of cooking for children will now, tastes can change pretty quickly. One week they love a certain food and a few weeks later, they can’t stand it. So, discuss your weekly plans with your family to ensure no one is going to have a problem with what’s for dinner in the week ahead.

Improve Your Range of Kitchen Appliances

If you want to try new things and create interesting meal ideas for your family, you should first upgrade your range of kitchen appliances. This will not only allow you to do more, but it will make your task of cooking much easier and faster too. Add things like metal shelving and new storage solutions to your kitchen too. These things will make it much more functional than it is right now.

Collect Recipes

It’s a good idea to start collecting and gatheringrecipes that appeal to you and that you think could make your meal plans better. There are so many places where you can find these. Cut them out of magazines and newspapers, and browse websites that list unique recipes. There are so many of them out there to explore, so this is something that you should try to do. Have fun with it and experiment a little.

Create Interesting Themes

Adding some fun to your meal plans is important, and you can do that by coming up with some interesting themes for the things you cook. For example, you could have a Mexican night. Some people even give a theme to each night of the week. Then you can come up with a different recipe that falls into that theme category each week. It’s a nice way of spicing things up and making meals interesting again.

Freeze for Ease

Freezing is a great way to take some of the effort out of your cooking schedule each week. If you have a bit of free time on one of the days of the week, you could dedicate that time to doing some batch cooking. That’s when you cook meals in large portions, share them out and then freeze them. That means that on some nights in the future, you won’t have to do any cooking at all. You’ll be able to simply take the food out of the freezer instead.

Planning meals for your family can often be pretty tough. It’s not easy to keep things fresh and interesting, but the ideas above will certainly help you with that.

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Hello

I’m Kelly, mama to Ethan (5) and bump (due December), wife to Ste and we live in Birmingham with our dog, two cats and two rabbits. You could say that life is pretty busy in our house… and it’s about to get busier!

TBM is a UK based family and lifestyle blog and vlog about my life, loves & adventures in motherhood, established since 2012. Here, I share my take on pregnancy, parenting, style, beauty, interiors, food and days out, and my mission to put the 'me' into mummy. Grab a cuppa and have a look around…